Monthly FileMaker Meetup – March 2016

Our FileMaker monthly Meetup group met this last Wednesday in a new space! It was beautiful and the conference room was enormous – with a convenient wireless presentation system for laptops to present on a giant projection screen. Our many thanks goes out to Ken Skeen and the fine folks at Hanna Andersson that graciously offered their space for our meeting, to Gerald Chang of Eight2 for providing drinks and Chris Irvine of ThreeProng.com for bringing the pizza and co-hosting the meeting!

Our topic was: FileMaker Alternative Modal Dialogue Showcase. The idea was to show alternative methods for creating a modal window, without using a custom dialogue. It was great to delve into the different ways in which developers will tackle and solve the same problem in different ways.

Marc Berning of Tilikum Software presented a modal window with an indefinitely paused script that required multiple pieces of information from the user before continuing. The input included types of info and functionality that were not possible with the standard custom dialogue box. He also included a fallback step that would cancel the operation after a certain amount of time if the user didn’t do anything.

David Weiner, our senior developer, showed a “lightbox” style modal screen using a fullscreen popover that required user input to continue. It used a simple “go to object” step if a required operation hadn’t been completed, and opened the popover, behaving like an alert window. The popover had a transparent background to remind the user of their context, but had a message and a button in the center that required the user’s acknowledgment to close it.

Chris Irvine of ThreeProng, presented a modal popover that couldn’t be closed without a specific script being run (in this case, a mail or cancel button). The popover had some validation steps that behaved much like an ecommerce site, reminding the user that they needed to enter some required info before continuing or canceling. The popover couldn’t be closed, however, until they had performed or canceled the operation.

Our meetings are free and open to the public. Our next meeting is scheduled for April 13th. If you’d like to learn more about it, and sign up to attend future meetings, please click here. We’d love to see you!